Engineering Manager - Robotics

Ocean Infinity; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 100,000 - 135,000; Full time

Job summary

Ocean Infinity is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead a group of engineers within our Robotics & Autonomy team. This senior role focuses on people leadership, performance, and capacity planning, ensuring teams are developed and aligned with organisational priorities.

You will work with team leads to grow technical leadership, balance resources across projects, and recruit top talent to scale the engineering organization. This role supports distributed teams across London and Porto.

Qualifications

• Several years’ experience managing and developing software engineers.
• Track record of hiring, retaining and developing engineering talent.
• Able to balance capacity across multiple projects.

Responsibilities

• Line-manage a group of engineers; conduct 1:1s and career development.
• Own performance management, recognition and rewards.
• Lead recruitment, onboarding and retention across the group.
• Plan capacity and allocate resources to projects.
• Collaborate with product and other teams to balance demands.
• Build succession and leadership pipeline.
• Protect team health and address performance issues.

Skills

Engineering management

Staff development

Hiring & onboarding

Resource planning

Performance reviews

Tools

ROS

Job description

AtOcean Infinity, we're on a bold mission to subsea data using innovative technology.

Using cutting-edge robotics, autonomous technology and world-class software, we're transforming how complex operations are carried out at sea. Our uncrewed systems are making ocean exploration and operationssafer, smarter and more sustainable, helping unlock the vast potential of our oceans while reducing environmental impact.

This isn't a vision for the future.It's happening right now.

As we continue to push the boundaries of innovation and redefine what's possible in the maritime industry, we're looking for exceptional talent to join our fast-growing team.

Ocean Infinity is looking for an Engineering Manager to own the people, organisational capability and engineering capacity of a group of engineers within our Robotics & Autonomy team. This is a senior people-leadership role: rather than owning the technical architecture or product priority, your role is to make sure the engineers in your group are well managed, performing to the best of their abilities, and developed and deployed against the organisation’s priorities.

You’ll work closely with team leads to keep technical leadership and people management aligned as the engineering group grows, and hold responsibility for building a scalable engineering team.

What you will do!

• Line-manage a group of engineers: run regular 1:1s, give feedback, and own their career development.

• Own performance management, recognition and reward for your engineers.

• Lead recruitment, onboarding and retention across your group.

• Own capacity and resource planning – decide where engineering resource is deployed and flag constraints early.

• Work with engineers to allocate them to projects, and manage workload to ensure projects can be delivered on time and with a high level of quality.

• Work with the product team and other team leads to resolve resource constraints and balance competing demands for capacity.

• Build the succession and technical leadership pipeline within your group, and identify capability gaps before they affect the team.

• Protect team health, engagement and working environment, and elevate organisational, staffing or performance issues that threaten delivery.

What we look for!

• Several years’ experience managing and developing software engineers, ideally within a scaling engineering organisation.

• A track record of hiring, retaining and developing engineering talent, including into more senior or lead roles.

• Comfortable balancing competing demands for engineering capacity across multiple concurrent projects or squads.

• Strong 1:1, coaching and feedback skills, with the judgement to handle performance issues fairly and directly.

• Enough technical credibility in engineering to earn the trust of the engineers you manage – you don’t need to own the technology, but you need to know how it works.

• Comfortable with capacity/resource planning and making trade-off calls under constraint.

• Genuine care for people’s development, combined with the willingness to have hard conversations about performance.

Nice to have!

• Background in robotics, autonomous systems, maritime, or other hardware-in-the-loop engineering environments.

• Experience managing distributed or multi-location teams.

• Familiarity with ROS or similar robotics middleware, even if not hands-on day-to-day.

• Previous experience in marine, defence, or aerospace.

*Salary: London/Southampton up to £135,000 / Porto up to 95,000 EUR*